Music Theory
My college degree is in Mathematics and Secondary Education. That means that my feathers get ruffled whenever I hear someone say “I’m not a math person” or “I’ve never used that Algebra I learned in High School” or something similar. I have probably confronted a dozen or more people in my life who have made such comments with either an immediate challenge or, after I do some research to find out what kind of math their occupation has embedded in it, a later challenge to show the how pervasive mathematics is in life by everyone.
To take this a step further, I’ve made comments that all hard sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), are applications of math and therefore, hierarchically, beneath mathematics. In other words, mathematics is the language God used to create the universe.
One of the areas I am pursuing growth in is my understanding of music. You see my brain is wired to be analytically based. There is a scene from the old MASH series where Charles, a surgeon, is trying to console and encourage a concert pianist that received hand nerve damage from a mortar fragments. He was explaining that God had given him hands that can make a scalpel sing but he would never be able to play music to touch hearers emotionally. I have always felt a similar limitation with music.
Anyway, I’m endeavoring to understand music theory. You know major scales, minor scales, chord creation, etc. I am taking a class to understand music theory. This week, we started minor scales which, at least so far, are variants of major scales. Some of my classmates were having a hard time understanding the variation process and one got emotionally despondent. The teacher tried to use the analogy of “music in captivity.”
In other words, a composer does not compose a song thinking of this major scale or that minor scale. I am guessing there are conventions that a lot of songs follow because God created us to like certain things. For example, I’ve already found out that a lot of symphonies are written in four movements where the first and third are written in a minor scale and the second and fourth movements are written in a major scale (major scale are happier sounding while minor scale is more sinister sounding).
But, and follow my thought process (if you can), God creates the music and inspires the composer to jot it down. Other musicians, with God’s help, developed the organization of the rules of music in captivity or the organizational rules that apply to many musical compositions.
God creates the beauty and man struggles to understand it.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that mathematics is just math in captivity as well. We see the universe God created and desire to understand it. The Physicist looks at, for example, the planets orbit around the sun and wants to develop the rules or equations to understand it and apply them to other situations.
This was a long-winded rabbit hole to explain how great God is in the creation of the universe and all the mechanics that make it up. I feel blessed and awed to get a small glimpse into the bigger picture of God’s creation.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” - Genesis 1:1-10 ESV
So, do not let me hear any of you say that you are not a math person!
